/ 2 September 2005

Liberia’s former fighters turn to violent crime

A wave of often serious crime by former fighters in Liberia has alarmed police and welfare officials, who say the ex-combatants are going back to armed tactics for lack of the post-war psychological help and education they need. Many youthful Liberians have grown up with nothing but violence and often drugs during conflict.

A wave of often serious crime by former fighters in Liberia has alarmed police and welfare officials, who say the ex-combatants are going back to armed tactics for lack of the post-war psychological help and education they need.

Late last month at Suakoko, near the central town of Gbarnga, an ex-rebel who fought for warlord-turned-president Charles Taylor in successive conflicts, Kerkuka Togbah, beat his wife to death when she refused him 10 Liberian dollars (R1,56) for a packet of cigarettes, witnesses said.

”In one month, we have had 18 cases of murder and the perpetrators are all ex-combatants,” Gbarnga police commissioner Colonel Kolleh Livingstone said.

The local police chief added that ”not later than last week, a former ATU boy [member of Taylor’s ‘anti-terrorist unit’] killed his own mother because she refused to give him food”.

”These young people find it difficult to accept the new situation where they can no longer use arms to get what they want,” Livingstone said.

Until Taylor was driven out of office and into exile in 2003, the West African country endured 14 months of brutal and successive civil wars.

Many youthful Liberians have grown up with nothing but violence and often drugs during conflict, presenting a huge social adaptation problem for experts in a government-sponsored and United Nations-backed disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) programme, which is low on resources.

Charles Achodo, a political adviser to the DDR programme, which got off to a difficult start and whose first stage ended in November last year, said last May that unless donor nations and organisations came up with funds soon, the reintegration of former fighters into civilian life could not go on.

In spite of pledges from the donor community, however, at present UN sources say while 50 000 ex-fighters, who were often child soldiers, are in primary schools or getting professional training, the others are lost for counselling and work in a country where the unemployment rate is up to 85% and welfare services are virtually non-existent.

In the coastal capital, Monrovia, the rate of armed robbery is on the up and up, seen by many people at a loss as the quickest and simplest means to get any money.

”In only the month of August, we arrested 24 armed robbers,” said Idriss Abraham, spokesperson for the police services in the UN mission in Liberia.

”This explains how frequent the criminal acts have become,” he added, while most of the violent crime is proving to be the doing of ex-fighters.

Seeking to reassure residents of the capital, police spokesperson Yvonne Stewart said ”officers of the international police, backed by UN soldiers, have started out night patrols throughout the city for more than a month now”.

Abraham said one young man was arrested strolling through the city centre swinging an AK-47 assault rifle first thing in the morning, and he stressed how drugs have long been a habit, making it harder for such people to adapt.

”These things are generally connected to the influence of drugs,” he said. ”During the war, the warlords transformed the youth into killing machines by sometimes forcing them to take drugs. Today, these young people find it difficult to leave those bad habits.”

George Sackor, a pastor in a Monrovia Protestant church, said it is up to priests working along with psychiatrists to help kids who were turned into ”killing machines to become normal people again”. — Sapa-AFP